On 26 September, Venezuelans will vote in the most volatile, unpredictable election in years. At stake: all 165 seats in Venezuela's single chamber national assembly, and President Hugo Chávez's aura of invincibility, to boot.

Far from running scared, Chávez was relaxed enough to spend the campaign's opening days not campaigning, but in Havana, consulting his long-time mentor Fidel Castro. Which is perhaps fitting, as Venezuelan elections are coming more and more to resemble Cuba's.

As in Cuba, the Venezuelan government barely disguises the use of official resources to finance the ruling party's campaign. When the Socialists decided to have an election rally in Barinas recently, a platoon of army soldiers were ordered to help set up. The five state TV channels, the dozens of state-backed "community radio" stations and a slew of state newspapers are unembarrassed to act as the propaganda arm of the ruling party, openly campaigning for the ruling party. Meanwhile, people who oppose the government on TV find themselves facing obscure criminal charges and radio stations that broadcast critical content are shut down en masse.

It's easy to make too much of the parallels, though: unlike Cuba, where all candidates run unopposed on the Communist party ticket, Venezuelan elections remain genuinely competitive. But they're far from free and fair. Most worrying is the blatant partiality of the body charged with organising them, the National Electoral Council. With its five-member board stacked four to one in favour of the government, the CNE – as it is known – has handed down a series of rulings that seriously build a massive pro-government tilt into the election's ground rules.

With one recent decision, the council gutted the constitutional mandate for a proportional electoral system, opening the door for the government to build up a massive supermajority in the national assembly on a bare majority of the popular vote. With another, it aggressively gerrymandered the constituency map to suit the government's interests. It's not just that majority opposition areas are bunched together into a handful of districts with huge supermajorities, it's that rural states – the backbone of Chávez's support – are massively overrepresented relative to urban areas.

The odds are stacked against them, no doubt. A government that has never made a secret of its admiration for the Cuban regime is responding to its slumping popularity by abusing its power more brazenly than ever before. Even so, at the moment, it's all to play for. And, in these circumstances, that is the truly remarkable thing.